| Daniela Fuentes styled hair and performed in drag In Miami, living openly as the woman she has known she was since she was a teenager in Cuba. On August 29, ICE put her on a deportation flight. She didn’t learn where it was going until she was in the air: the Central African Republic, a country where she has no family, no ties, and doesn’t speak the language. Now she lives in a compound for male deportees. She wears men’s clothes, lowers her voice, and puts on her wig only in the bathroom, where no one can see her. Daniela Fuentes came to the United States from Cuba and worked as a hairstylist and drag performer in Miami. Then she was picked up by ICE, detained, and deported to the Central African Republic, a country she’s never been to, where she knows no one, doesn’t speak the language, and LGBTQ+ people are often targeted for violence and worse. “Everything is difficult here because I have to hide who I am,” Fuentes told the AP. Explaining that she rarely leaves the room she shares with four men, she said, “I don’t know this place, the people or the language, and I have no idea what will happen to me.”  Fuentes knew who she was from an early age and started hormone treatment at age 18. Now in her early thirties, she has lived as her authentic self for more than a decade. In Cuba, she says she was targeted over her gender identity and attacked more than once, with scars on her head and arm as reminders of that hatred. The police also harassed her over operating a legal private hair salon from the home that she owned. As things got worse for her in Cuba, she chose to leave the country in 2023, traveling incognito through Central America and Mexico. She entered the United States under a program that allowed migrants to live in the US for two years based on humanitarian grounds. The program, CBP One, was expanded under President Joe Biden’s administration as a path to request asylum at the Mexico-United States border, and Fuentes was able to book an asylum appointment. Under the Trump administration, CBP One was shut down and appointments canceled. By March 2025, it was rebranded and relaunched as CBP Home to push immigrants to self-deport. By October 2025, ProPublica reported that many who had tried to use the system to self-deport were stranded because they had not received the travel documents and financial aid the program had promised. Fuentes set up a life in Florida and requested that her asylum case be moved from Texas courts to Florida ones. However, she was picked up by ICE and detained when they found that she had missed a court date in Texas that she couldn’t get to and had received no communication in response to her request. In detention, she was housed with men and denied access to female clothes and her wig. She was then put on a plane and only learned it was headed to the Central African Republic after it was already in the air. After her time in ICE detention, she is now trapped in a country where she doesn’t feel safe and says she is having to hide her gender identity under male clothes, making efforts to conceal her breasts, and masking her voice by making it sound lower. She is forced to attempt to pass as a different gender and only feels safe to wear her wig when in the bathroom by herself. In the Central African Republic, Fuentes is housed in a compound: an apartment complex where male deportees are kept. While they’re technically allowed to leave freely, officials and advocates have advised against doing so without escorts. The deported people have no identification, which prevents them from working and could easily lead to issues with the local authorities. In the complex, it is falling on the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration and crowdfunded grocery runs to ensure that these deported people can eat. In the male complex, she shares a room with four male detainees. The smallest silver lining is that Fuentes says the men know she is a woman and support and protect her. Fuentes says she is awaiting travel documents that would allow her to leave the country. The Cuban Embassy has agreed to allow her to return to Cuba, but she already fled the country for her safety once. She hopes to seek asylum in another country now that the United States has made it clear it is also not safe, with her eyes set on Canada. The State Department advises Americans to avoid traveling to the Central African Republic, but it is one of at least a dozen nations that have agreed to accept “third country” deportations: people being deported not to their home country, but to a place they have no connection to. While there have been challenges to the decision to deport immigrants to a third country, the Supreme Court in September lifted a lower court’s injunction against the practice, allowing it to continue while they weigh the larger case. “These are not bureaucratic errors or isolated incidents,” Bridget Crawford, the legal director for the LGBTQ+ non-profit Immigration Equality, told the AP. “They are the predictable result of policies that purposefully abandon our legal and moral obligation to protect LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing persecution.” Since an agreement was made with Cuba in 2023, the US has a policy to repatriate people to Cuba, and there are regular flights that Fuentes could have been sent on if she were deported. It is not clear why she was sent to the Central African Republic instead. |
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